‘First Black President’

Re “Clinton Library Expected to Benefit Black Businesses,” Feb. 15: I would like to remind all the black people in Arkansas who think that Bill Clinton was “our first black president” that it was President Lyndon B. Johnson who fought and then passed the first civil rights bill after the Civil War, and it was also Johnson who put the first black man, Thurgood Marshall, on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Clinton had several chances of nominating a black man or woman to the Supreme Court but he chose two white people instead. I am sure that he did treat the black people with respect and was of help to them, but to say that he was the first president to respect the black people is an insult to all the things that Lyndon B. Johnson did at a time when racism was a popular attitude in this country.

Daria Case

Sherman Oaks